


“I like this player. It played well. It did not give up.”

by ARSONjST



Series: Dream SMP Short Stories [7]
Category: Dream SMP - Fandom
Genre: But she doesn't have a tag, Gen, Immortal Philza, Implied Karnapity, Kristen is here too, Temporary Character Death, Time Travelling Karl Jacobs, Web Series: Tales from the SMP, characters not mentioned in tags
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-28
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-12 15:40:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29761848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ARSONjST/pseuds/ARSONjST
Summary: Karl knew he could lose his mind time traveling, but hadn't realized he could also lose his life. Karl awakens in an unfamiliar room. Two unfamiliar voices speak to him through soft whispers and echoing, combining tones because two certain immortals refuses to let this happen this way.
Series: Dream SMP Short Stories [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2068716
Comments: 3
Kudos: 49





	“I like this player. It played well. It did not give up.”

**Author's Note:**

> I heavily edited the End Poem so it's not super accurate but thank you to whoever wrote it for giving me so much inspiration.  
> Also, immortal Philza being canon? Hell yes. Philza Minecraft is quite old (Canonically.)

Karl groaned, every muscle in his body sore and aching as his consciousness returned with a pounding headache. His chest burned as he slowly forced himself up to a sitting position and then to his feet. As he looked around, the whole room he was in seemed to be everlasting. It was dark, gloomy, and cobweb-ridden, lit by only dim candlelight and whatever managed to come through the cracks and holes of dusty windows and warm Karl’s icy skin. He was cold, far too cold to still be living. The last thing he could remember was someone stabbing him as he tried to escape them, which seemed to be becoming a common occurrence in his time-traveling experiences. And it also probably explained why he was so cold. He staggered from foot to foot, his dull eyes staring around as the green swirl in them slowly faded away, he had no idea where he was or what he was doing and as he looked down he noticed his sweatshirt seemed to be blacked out, almost like it was decorated for a funeral.

“ _I see the player you mean._ ” A voice spoke,

“ **Karl?** ” Another voice said, 

They were echoing down the tall hallways of whatever dark and gloomy mansion Karl had ended up in. He couldn’t pinpoint the location of the source of them. They were omnipotent and bouncing around the nearly empty tiled room. The ends of the room were hard to even see, so he began to stumble towards a candle set on a table. He was secretly hoping if he held it he’d be able to have some sort of guide to fight back against the darkness that surrounded everything around him.

“ _Yes. Take care. It has reached a higher level now. It can read our thoughts._ ” 

“ **That doesn't matter. It thinks we are part of the game.** ”

“ _I like this player. It played well. It did not give up.”_

 _“_ **It is hearing our thoughts as though they were their own.”**

 **“** _That is how it chooses to imagine many things, when it is deep in the dream of a game, right?”_

“ **Yes, thoughts** **make a wonderful interface. Very flexible. And less terrifying than hearing the reality behind your mind.”**

Karl looked around, his eyes glancing at the candle as he picked it up and swung it around. There was much to see, besides torn and burnt paintings of a family of three. Another was of a man with large black wings, but the rest was hard to make out because of the years of dirt, grime, dust, and soot that had collected on it. Karl continued forward.

**“** _They used to hear voices. Before players could read. Back in the days when those who did not play called the players witches, and warlocks. And players dreamed they flew through the air, on sticks powered by demons.”_

 _“_ **What did this player dream?”**

 **“** _This player dreamed of sunlight and trees. Of fire and water. It dreamed it created. And it dreamed it destroyed. It dreamed it hunted, and was hunted. It dreamed of shelter. It dreamed it saved its friends and its family.”_

“ **But what true structure did this player create, in the reality behind the screen?”**

_“It worked, with a million others, to sculpt a true world in a fold of the [∷ᒷ↸ᔑᓵℸ ̣ ᒷ↸], and created a [∷ᒷ↸ᔑᓵℸ ̣ ᒷ↸] for [∷ᒷ↸ᔑᓵℸ ̣ ᒷ↸], in the [∷ᒷ↸ᔑᓵℸ ̣ ᒷ↸].”_

“ **It cannot hear that thought.”**

_“No. It has not yet achieved the highest level. That, it must achieve in the long dream of life, not the short dream of a game.”_

“ **Does it know that we love it? That the universe is kind?”**

“ _Sometimes, through the noise of its thoughts, it hears the universe, yes.”_

“ **But there are times it is sad, in the long dream. It creates worlds that have no summer, and it shivers under a black sun, and it takes its sad creation for reality.”**

“ _To cure it of sorrow would destroy it. The sorrow is part of its own private task. We cannot interfere.”_

The voices began to merge into one as they said, _“Sometimes when they are deep in dreams, I want to tell them, they are building true worlds in reality. Sometimes I want to tell them of their importance to the universe. Sometimes, when they have not made a true connection in a while, I want to help them to speak the word they fear.”_

_“It reads our thoughts.”_

_“Sometimes I do not care. Sometimes I wish to tell them, this world you take for truth is merely [∷ᒷ↸ᔑᓵℸ ̣ ᒷ↸] and [∷ᒷ↸ᔑᓵℸ ̣ ᒷ↸], I wish to tell them that they are [ ∷ᒷ↸ᔑᓵℸ ̣ ᒷ↸] in the [∷ᒷ↸ᔑᓵℸ ̣ ᒷ↸]. They see so little of reality, in their long dream.”_

Karl continued down the hall, he could see trinkets in golden crested glass boxes. A leash named ‘spins’, two music disks that were tattered and nearly destroyed, a tan jacket with a dark hood that was tattered, some weapons and other name tags from various people, and four books that were messy in nature but stacked neatly. There was a set of three matching rings that made Karl’s throat bulge and made his vision blur. He had to keep walking to keep himself calm. He was still oddly cold.

“And yet they play the game. But it would be so easy to tell them, to tell them how to live is to prevent them living.I will not tell the player how to live.” The voice laughed, fatherly, “The player is growing restless, it seems, so I will tell the player a story, but not the truth. No. A story that contains the truth safely, in a cage of words. Not the naked truth that can burn over any distance…”

The first voice hummed as Karl approached a painting that hadn’t been destroyed in the test of time, it was of two seemingly angels. One with black wings and one with white. Elytra's, they seemed to be. Something Karl had only heard of in fairytales and seen on other servers were Hybrids ran amuck and lived together by a beautiful pond. The woman wore a pale blue dress donned with diamond and Netherite armor, smiling gently as her brown hair framed her face. The man behind her wore an identical colored dress shirt and pants with armor atop them. He was looking at her as he grinned gently, his hair braided back from his face.

**“Yes. A story for The Player.”**

_“Use its name.”_ The first voice chimed, soft and feminine.

 **“Karl Jacobs. Player of games. Savior of Timelines and Traveller of Time.”** The second voice spoke, clear and calm.

 _“Good.”_ The first voice giggled.

The voices began to combine again as if they were speaking in time with one another. They were separate, like two individuals, but sung together like a melody, “Take a breath, now. Take another. Feel air in your lungs. Let your limbs return. Yes, move your fingers. Have a body again, under gravity, in air. Respawn in the long dream. There you are. Your body touching the universe again at every point, as though you were separate things. As though we were separate things.”

**“Who are we? Once we were called the spirit of the mountain. Father sun, mother moon. Ancestral spirits, animal spirits. Jinn. Ghosts. The green man. Then gods, demons. Angels. Poltergeists. Aliens, extraterrestrials. Leptons, quarks. The words change. We do not change.”**

_“We are the universe. We are everything you think isn't you. You are looking at us now, through your skin and your eyes. And why does the universe touch your skin, and throw light on you? To see you, player. To know you. And to be known. We shall tell you a story.”_

**“Once upon a time, there was a player.”**

_“The player was you, Karl.”_

**“Sometimes it thought itself human, on the thin crust of a spinning globe of molten rock. The ball of molten rock circled a ball of blazing gas that was three hundred and thirty thousand times more massive than it. They were so far apart that light took eight minutes to cross the gap. The light was information from a star, and it could burn your skin from a hundred and fifty million kilometers away. Sometimes the player dreamed it was a miner, on the surface of a world that was flat, and infinite. The sun was a square of white. The days were short; there was much to do; and death was a temporary inconvenience.”**

_“Sometimes the player dreamed it was lost in a story.”_

**“Sometimes the player dreamed it was other things, in other places. Sometimes these dreams were disturbing. Sometimes very beautiful indeed. Sometimes the player woke from one dream into another, then woke from that into a third.”**

_“Sometimes the player dreamed it watched words on a screen… Let's go back. The atoms of the player were scattered in the grass, in the rivers, in the air, in the ground. A woman gathered the atoms; she drank and ate and inhaled; and the woman assembled the player, in her body. And the player awoke, from the warm, dark world of its mother's body, into the long dream.”_

**“And the player was a new story, never told before, written in letters of DNA. And the player was a new program, never run before, generated by a sourcecode a billion years old. And the player was a new human, never alive before, made from nothing but milk and love.”**

_“You are the player. The story. The program. The human. Made from nothing but milk and love. Let's go further back, the seven billion billion billion atoms of the player's body were created, long before this game, in the heart of a star. So the player, too, is information from a star. And the player moves through a story, which is a forest of information planted by a man called Philza, on a interesting infinite world created by a man called Dream, that exists inside a small, private world created by the player, who inhabits a universe created by--”_

**_“_ ** **Shush, love.”** The second voice laughed and it echoed.

These voices were in love, weren’t they? Karl followed them, feeling a pull towards them as they began to funnel down a hallway lined with scribbled lyrics on signs that had been placed in desperation. The floors were made of obsidian that was hot under his feet and every window was covered by a thick layer of lava or a line of scarlet TNT stained with drying yet ever-wet blood.

**“Sometimes the player created a small, private world that was soft and warm and simple. Sometimes hard, and cold, and complicated. Sometimes it built a model of the universe in its head; flecks of energy, moving through vast empty spaces. Sometimes it called those flecks "electrons" and "protons,” Sometimes it called them "planets" and "stars.”**

_“Sometimes it believed it was in a universe that was made of energy that was made of offs and ons; zeros and ones; lines of code. Sometimes it believed it was playing a game. You are the player, who decoded our voices into words; decoded words into meaning; decoded meaning into feelings, emotions, theories, ideas, and the player started to breathe faster and deeper and realized it was alive, it was alive, those thousand deaths had not been real, the player was alive.”_

“You. You. You are alive.” They both said.

_“And sometimes the player believed the universe had spoken to it through the sunlight that came through the shuffling leaves of the summer trees, and sometimes the player believed the universe had spoken to it through the light that fell from the crisp night sky of winter, where a fleck of light in the corner of the player's eye might be a star a million times as massive as the sun, boiling its planets to plasma in order to be visible for a moment to the player, walking home at the far side of the universe, suddenly smelling food, almost at the familiar door, about to dream again.”_

**“and sometimes the player believed the universe had spoken to it through the zeros and ones, through the electricity of the world, through the scrolling words on a screen at the end of a dream.”**

Karl could see two figures standing side by side, one was glitching like she was a broken hologram. Her brown hair was braided with thousands of different flora and her dress was whiter than the purest snow. Great white wings furled out from her back and they shined with every gem Karl had ever laid his eyes on, and they refracted every single color Karl could see. She wore a white veil over her face and she smiled as she spoke,

“and the universe said I love you, and the universe said you have played the game well, and the universe said everything you need is within you, and the universe said you are stronger than you know…” 

The woman waved and fizzled away like a melted candle, and the man walked towards Karl slowly, his black wings rustling. Unlike the woman, he wore all black, a suit that shined with the prettiest gems and beads painted a thousand colors on his black backdrop of a suit. He stopped maybe twenty feet from Karl, his black hat tilting as the veil around its brim sparkled like starlight,

“and the universe said you are the daylight, and the universe said you are the night, and the universe said the darkness you fight is within you, and the universe said the light you seek is within you, and the universe said you are not alone, and the universe said you are not separate from every other thing, and the universe said you are the universe tasting itself, talking to itself, reading its own code.”

Karl watched as the man turned, his wings blocking the blazing hot sun behind him as he spoke gently, “and, Karl, the universe said I love you because you are love.” 

He looked at a purple bead on his hat and smiled, turning back to the weak time traveler who laid before him.

“And the game was over and the player woke up from the dream. And the player began a new dream.” He swirled his hands in a beautiful pattern, the beads and gems that donned him in layers of the finest jewelry swaying and clinking as a small red heart appeared in his hands, “And the player dreamed again, dreamed better. And the player was the universe. And the player was love.” The heart left his grasp and floating towards Karl, he held a hand out until it laid in his palm, cold and heavy. It was cartoonish even with two darker diamond-like shapes on either side.

“You are the player.” The winged man said as the heart began to glow brighter and brighter, **“Wake up!”**

Karl lurched forward, breathing heavily as he sat up from a stone floor. He gasped and sputtered, looking around to see he was back in his library. He was alive. The first thing he grabbed was his diary. He needed to remember this. He wrote down something that would confuse anyone else, ‘opposite of the in-between, Philza was here.’ A breeze blew across his back, a white veil poking out of his now brightly colored hoodie pocket.


End file.
